One of Digby's readers does a nice job of tying together the neocon philosophy of preemptive war, the Bush Doctrine, with Dick Cheney's torture fetish:
The idea [of the Bush Doctrine] was that the US had the right to attack and invade other countries and change their governments because we thought they, or their proxies, or just a splinter-group of their citizens, might possibly be a threat to our citizens in the future. And if you explore that idea to it's logical conclusion you would have to agree that accepting the Bush Doctrine means you agree that the US can kill large numbers of innocent civilians in these countries, and wound and dislocate many many more. We can do this to people who never did us any harm, because our current leaders want to protect us from what their future leaders might do at some unspecified future date. Just collateral damage, don't you know.
Well, since we've built our logical case to this point, let's follow it to it's ineluctable conclusion: If that's all OK on a government to government level, it must be OK on a personal level too. And there it is: Cheney's torture policy is just the Bush Doctrine for individuals. The (evil) genius of it is that he's found a way to indefinitely extend the ticking time-bomb scenario. If we can invade other countries and kill and maim their citizens because of something their leaders might do, then surely we can do the same to individuals who may not know of any time-bombs currently ticking, but who might know of someone else who might start a bomb ticking at some future date.
What needs to be mentioned, additionally, is Cheney's one percent doctrine: If there's even the slightest chance that the enemy could present a danger, then the US has the right to defend itself by invading a country and killing hundreds of thousands. Or, in the case of torture, crushing testicles. Here's how Cheney described his worldview:
"If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response."
Now put torture into this perspective. Bush and Cheney were using torture because they treated every scenario as though there was a ticking time bomb. If one actually allows himself to give in to that paranoid, pathological worldview, then it's easy to see how Liz and Dick Cheney can rationalize the use of torture in their own perverted minds. Every detainee was a threat. Take no chances. Anything less than a response that assumed the worst was unacceptable.
